Teachers’ words matter, and students’ do too – from science to the humanities. We are excited to have our work with educators featured in this article, “The Sound of Inclusion”, that we wrote for The Conversation. There are so many amazing teachers and students who are the inspiration for this article and for all our work — too many to tag, but we are so grateful to you all!

I sat down with The Ling Space in January at the Linguistic Society of America Conference to talk language, culture, and educational policy. Thanks to The Ling Space for such a great interview!

Published on Feb 18, 2017

We’re really excited to have gotten to interview Anne Charity Hudley at the Linguistic Society of America meeting in January! Dr. Charity Hudley is an associate professor at the College of William and Mary, and the inaugural William and Mary Professor of Community Studies. She’s co-authored two books on English language variation in classroom settings, and also wrote the section on language and racialization in the Oxford Handbook of Language and Society. She’s a great sociolinguistic researcher who’s doing a lot of work on dialectal variation, linguistic justice, and more. You can find out more about her and her work at https://annecharityhudley.com/

In our interview, we discussed the following topics:
– the importance of attending to language variation in the classroom
– what teachers and students have to learn from linguists, and vice versa
– the role language and linguistics has played in racialization, and how to get away from that
– how to work to convince people of the importance of interacting with language variation and linguistic justice
– why we should do more to get younger people involved in linguistics and research

This UMBC News story describes how our free iPhone app for teachers, “Valuable Voices,” is reaching teachers far outside our own networks. If you haven’t already, go to the App store, search “Valuable Voices,” and download, or click here for the link. And if you are a teacher and are interested in participating in our follow up study later this year, send us an email!

From Anne: I’m happy to announce that I have accepted an offer to be the North Hall Endowed Chair in the Linguistics of African America and Director of Undergraduate Research at UC Santa Barbara effective July 1st, 2017. I will be responsible for coordinating and overseeing undergraduate research programs for over 20,000 undergraduates at the first Minority-Serving Institution that is also a member of the Association of American Universities. I will also be working in particular to enrich the experiences of UCSB’s over 900 African-American students. I’ll be accepting graduate students with interests in African-American language, culture, and justice to UCSB Linguistics and UCSB Department of Black Studies. Virginia and William & Mary will always be a place that we consider home. California here we come. I’m ready to learn. #GoGauchxs

We are excited to spread the word about our latest educational outreach initiative… a free iPhone app!! The app provides 12 ready-to-implement exercises for students and educators — one a month, for a year’s worth of teaching — to build awareness of language and culture. The teaching exercises are geared toward middle/high school English but can easily be adapted for elementary or even college, in a variety of content areas. Please download it, use it, and let us know what you liked — and didn’t! To download the app, go to the App Store on your iPhone and type in “Valuable Voices” — here is a screenshot so that you know what to look for. To our knowledge this is the only sociolinguistics app of its kind! Hopefully one day we can expand to create more apps — and expand to make the apps available to Android users, too. We couldn’t have done it without our team of assistants and our teacher consultants – thank you all!